The Wanderer's Maze

Monday, January 15, 2018

Throughout the following morning—walking to Montauk
High, squeezing down crowded hallways, sulking in first period study
hall—Corbin had tried his best to keep his mind from straying back to the
peacocks, or otherwise evoking a recrudescence of the image. The
route from his house to the school a mile and half away ran along the same
expressway that let onto the gravel thoroughfare to Peacock Grove. As he
approached this turnout, Corbin practiced the first aversion technique Dr.
Phillpots had showed him: he rapidly clenched and released his fists, inhaled
deeply, and held his breath, so that a tingling began to work its way up his
neck. This tingling permitted him to pass the turnout without surrendering to
the urge to bolt down it, despite catching the far-off echoes of a peacock’s “nee-ooOWWw!”

In study hall, Corbin’s eyes wandered from the
“Common Law and Constitutional Courts” chapter of his American Civics
Now! textbook to a poster tacked up on a chalk-dusted corkboard in the
corner. The infographic poster featured an array of Jurassic fossils,
fine-print columns, and the title “Archaeopteryx: Very Early Bird,” all
orbiting a central meter-tall painting of this interstitial creature. The
painting’s vibrant cobalt feathers made Corbin nervous; he decided to deploy
the second method he had learned from Dr. Phillpots, the covert conditioning
technique of calling up negative counter-images to associate with the peacocks.
He closed his eyes and imagined that the act of looking at a peacock provoked
hot urine to spread across his crotch, as onlookers snickered. The prickling
dread of this vision pushed him to return to his reading assignment.

By third period computer lab, Corbin’s worries
began to pullulate. Neither the fist pumping exercise nor the urine vision were
sufficient anymore to quell his desire to escape back to the peacocks. So he
reverted to his own method of systematic desensitization: he pulled up a cache
of peafowl picture files from a cloud drive and made hard copies on the color
printer once the lab monitor stepped out. He also slipped a pair of steel
sheers from the supply cabinet into his bag. At lunch twenty minutes later, he
crouched on a dirt patch under a hawthorn tree, behind the cafeteria’s cement
patio, and laid the pictures out around him. He pulled out covert feathers from
the Grove and placed them beside the pictures. He then picked up one of the
pictures, a photo of a peacock perched on a headstone outside a conical Yazidi
shrine, and began cutting around the painted eyes at the tips of its raised
train.

“Nice strokes. Very smooth,” a breathy female voice
spoke in Corbin’s left ear, raising the hair on his arms. The shears stopped
cutting. Bending over him was Patricia Foxcroft, a sixteen-year-old sophomore
Corbin had often watched with curiosity from the back of art class. Patricia
had assiduously cultivated an arch goth couture: she wore licorice-black
lipstick; her raven fringe lay straight across her pale forehead, over her
sharply manicured eyebrows; an iron ring dangled from the leather choker around
her neck; the silk laces on her knee-high boots matched those running up the
back of her paisley-overlay corset dress and down her fingerless elbow gloves.
Corbin caught the scent of anise as she knelt next to him and lifted one of his
pictures between her long fingers.

“Peacocks. Love peacocks. Did you know sometimes
the males will fake orgasms with the females to attract more mates?” Patricia asked.
She replaced the picture on the dirt and took up one of the covert feathers.
Corbin opened his mouth to answer but said nothing. Patricia continued,
“Actually, I’m planning on getting a tattoo of one of these, right here.” She
bent the feather into a curl and held it against her bare thigh, above her boot
collar. “What do you think?”

“Um, yeah, that—yeah,” Corbin stumbled.

“I wanted to ask you, your name is Corbin?”

Corbin nodded.

“Good. Well, Corbin, I heard from this bitch Aubrey
that they caught you trespassing in a rich neighborhood, to get at the peacocks
there, like you’re obsessed with them. Is that true?” The edges of Patricia’s
mouth thinned into a smirk as she looked down at him with dark-magenta-rimmed
eyes.

“Um, well, I—”

“Catch!” An object landed with a wet thud on a picture
near Corbin’s knee. Corbin leapt to his feet, gripping the shears about the
screw, when he saw what the object was: a bluebird carcass in the active stage
of decay. It had been pulled up from the damp grass that had grown entwined
with it. A family of sexton beetles scurried out from its ribcage, which was
poking through clumps of ichorous gore and beige tufts. Half a dozen cerulean
feathers remained fluttering from its stiff wings. Ants swarmed in the right
eye socket. Corbin winced from the heavy putrescent odor.

“Oh shit!” Patricia covered her nose and doubled
over laughing in the direction of her friend, Jasmine, who had thrown the
decomposing bird. Jasmine stood a foot shorter then Patricia and wore an
oversized Sex Spiders of Leng t-shirt that hung down to the cuffs of her black
jean-shorts.

As Jasmine put up her hand in defense, she raked
her palm over the shears’ tip. “Ow! What the fuck?” She showed her scraped
palm to Patricia as it began to bead with blood.

“I—sorry.” Corbin backed away and pinched the
bridge of his nose. His sinciput was stinging again, signaling a return of the
image. He turned and started off sprinting in the opposite direction, back
toward the expressway. He was still gripping the shears, but he had abandoned the
rest of his things at Patricia and Jasmine’s feet.

“Hey, get back here!” Jasmine yelled, but her voice
was already faint in Corbin’s head.

Corbin ran until his chest burned. As he ran, his
feet carrying him instinctively toward his destination, the shears hard in his
hand, he watched, in his mind’s theater, moth-sized snowflakes flutter down
around the peacock perched on the frozen lip of a tiered fountain. The peacock
raised its full fan. It shuddered in its empyreal radiance.

Seven minutes later, Officer Mandy found Corbin face
down in the roundabout. Pinned under his arched torso was a desperately squirming
peacock. She noticed blood on the lawn, in sprayed droplets and trickling rivulets,
near the peacock’s saddle.

Officer Mandy had been jolted awake in the microcar
half a minute prior by savage squawks like none she had ever heard from the
peafowl. She bounded out of the microcar toward the squawks. Most of the other peafowl
were huddled at the edge of the roundabout, poking their heads between the citrus
tree branches to peer out at their distressed comrade under Corbin.

At first it seemed Corbin had attacked the peacock.
When Officer Mandy pulled him over by the shoulder, though, she discovered that
the peacock was gripping his throat with its talons. As soon as the uninjured
peacock yanked its train free, it sprung off Corbin’s chest and took flight in
a low trajectory toward the other peafowl. A slit opened by the peacock’s spur ran
down Corbin’s sternothyroid muscle.
In his internal jugular gaped three puncture holes gouged by the attacker’s
toes. Blood pulsed out of Corbin’s body. Officer Mandy reached for the roll of
gauze in her belt’s trauma kit as she speed-dialed the paramedics on her phone’s
CB handset attachment. While she pressed the damp wad against the wounds and
waited for the ambulance, she noticed Corbin’s shears laying a yard away in the
grass. He had dropped them there before reaching for the peacock.

Corbin would remain in a hemorrhage-induced coma
for the next thirty-one hours. Soon after he awoke, following a successful transfusion,
he was less relieved to learn that he would suffer no long-term impact from his
injuries than he was to find that the urge to visit the peacocks had passed. The
intruding image was gone.

A green peacock is said to have once killed a man
in Bangkok, since a blood clot caused by the head gash it had inflicted
resulted in its victim’s death—and peacocks at public parks have been known to
wound small children and damage vehicles—but in its ferocity, the attack on
Corbin was unique. Not only was the responsible peacock in this case not
euthanized, though, but once identified and fitted with conspicuous bronze anklets,
the residents of Peacock Grove celebrated it as their prized defender. Sir Galahad,
as the peacock was known thereafter, spent its remaining days strutting between
languors among the citrus trees and dips in the tiered fountain and posing for
pictures with adoring residents and their guests, only occasionally charging at
them in truculent fits of wrath.

Sunday, January 7, 2018

Throughout the following morning—walking to Montauk
High, squeezing down crowded hallways, sulking in first period study hall—Corbin
had tried his best to keep his mind from straying back to the peacocks, or
otherwise evoking a recrudescence of the image. The route from his house
to the school a mile and half away ran along the same expressway that let onto
the gravel thoroughfare to Peacock Grove. As he approached this turnout, Corbin
practiced the first aversion technique Dr. Phillpots had showed him: he rapidly
clenched and released his fists, inhaled deeply, and held his breath, so that a
tingling began to work its way up his neck. This tingling permitted him to pass
the turnout without surrendering to the urge to bolt down it, despite catching the
far-off echoes of a peacock’s “nee-ow-ow!”

In study hall, Corbin’s eyes strayed from the “Common
Law and Constitutional Courts” chapter of his American Civics Now! textbook
to the poster tacked up on a chalk-dusted corkboard in the corner. The infographic
poster featured an array of Jurassic fossils, fine-print columns, and the title
“Archaeopteryx: Very Early Bird,” all orbiting a central painting of this interstitial
creature. The painting’s vibrant cobalt feathers made Corbin nervous; he
decided to deploy the second method he had learned from Dr. Phillpots, the covert
conditioning technique of calling up negative counter-images to associate with the
peacocks. He closed his eyes and imagined that the sight of a peacock compelled
hot urine to spread across his crotch as onlookers snickered. The prickling dread
brought on by this exercise finally pushed him to return to his reading
assignment.

By third period computer lab, Corbin’s worries
began to pullulate. Neither the fist pumping exercise nor the urine vision were
sufficient anymore to quell his desire to escape back to the peacocks. So he reverted
to his own method of systematic desensitization: he pulled up a cache of
peafowl image files from a cloud drive and made hard copies on the color
printer once the lab monitor stepped out. He also slipped a pair of steel
sheers from the supply cabinet in his bag. At lunch twenty minutes later, he crouched
on a dirt patch under a hawthorn tree, behind the cafeteria’s cement patio, and
laid the pictures out around him. He pulled out two covert feathers from the Grove
and placed them beside the pictures. He then picked up an image of a peacock
perched on a headstone outside a Yazidi shrine and began cutting around the painted
eyes at the tips of its raised train.

“Nice strokes. Very smooth,” a breathy female voice
spoke in Corbin’s left ear, raising the hair on his arms. The shears stopped
cutting. Bending over him was Patricia Foxcroft, a sixteen year-old sophomore
Corbin had often watched with wistful curiosity from the back of art class. Patricia
assiduously cultivated an arch goth couture: she wore licorice-black lipstick;
her raven fringe lay straight across her pale forehead, above her sharp
eyebrows; an iron ring dangled from the leather choker around her neck; the
silk laces on her knee-high boots matched those running up the back of her paisley
overlay corset dress and zigzagging down her fingerless elbow gloves. Corbin
caught the scent of anise as she knelt next to him and lifted one of his pictures
between her long crimson nail-tipped fingers.

“Peacocks. Love peacocks. Did you know that sometimes
the males will fake orgasms with the females to attract more mates?” Patricia
asked as she replaced the picture on the dirt and took up one of the covert
feathers. Corbin opened his mouth to answer but said nothing. Patricia
continued, “Actually, I’m planning on getting a tattoo of one of these, right
here.” She bent the feather into a curl and held it against her bare thigh,
above her boot collar. “What do you think?”

“Um, yeah, that—yeah,” Corbin stumbled.

“I wanted to ask you, your name is Corbin?”

Corbin nodded.

“Good. Well, Corbin, I heard from this bitch Aubrey
they caught you trespassing in the rich neighborhood to get at the peacocks
there, like you’re obsessed with them. Is that true?” Patricia’s mouth curled
into a smirk as she looked up at him with her dark magenta-rimmed eyes.

“Um, well, I—”

“Catch!” An object landed with a wet thud on the picture
near Corbin’s knee. Corbin leapt to his feet, gripping the shears about the
screw, when he saw what the object was: a bluebird carcass in the active stage
of decomposition, pulled up from the damp grass that had grown into it. A
family of sexton beetles scurried out from between the ribs poking through clumps
of congealed gore and beige feather tufts. Half a dozen cerulean feathers remained clinging
to the stiff wings. Ants swarmed in the right eye socket. Corbin winced from
the heavy putrescent odor.

“Oh shit!” Patricia covered her nose and doubled
over laughing in the direction of her friend Jasmine, who had thrown the decaying
bird. Jasmine stood a foot shorter then Patricia and wore an oversized Sex Spiders
of Leng t-shirt that hung over the cuffs of her black jean-shorts.

Sunday, December 31, 2017

Throughout the following morning—walking to Montauk
High, squeezing down crowded hallways, sulking in first period study hall—Corbin
had tried his best to keep his mind from straying back to the peacocks, or
otherwise evoking a recrudescence of the image. The route from his house
to the school a mile and half away ran along the same expressway that let onto
the gravel thoroughfare to Peacock Grove. As he approached this turnout, Corbin
practiced the first aversion technique Dr. Phillpots had showed him: he rapidly
clenched and released his fists, inhaled deeply, and held his breath, so that a
tingling began to work its way up his neck. This tingling permitted him to pass
the turnout without surrendering to the urge to bolt down it, despite catching the
far-off echoes of a peacock’s “nee-ow-ow!”

In study hall, Corbin’s eyes strayed from the “Common
Law and Constitutional Courts” chapter of his American Civics Now! textbook
to the poster tacked up on a corkboard in the corner. The infographic poster,
dusted with chalk, featured an array of Jurassic fossils, sweeping arrows, fine-print
columns, and the title “Archaeopteryx: Very Early Bird,” all orbiting a central
painting of this interstitial creature. The painting’s vibrant cobalt feathers
made Corbin nervous, so he decided to deploy the second method he had learned
from Dr. Phillpots, the covert conditioning technique of calling up negative counter-images
to associate with the peacock. He closed his eyes and imagined that the sight
of a peacock caused hot urine to spread across his crotch as onlookers snickered.
The dread brought on by this exercise finally pushed him to return to his
reading assignment.

By third period computer lab, Corbin’s worries
began to pullulate. Neither the fist pumping exercise nor the urine vision were
managing to quell his desire to escape back to the peacocks anymore. Thus, he reverted
to his own method of systematic desensitization: he pulled up a cache of
peafowl image files from a cloud drive and made hard copies on the color
printer after the lab monitor stepped out. He also grabbed a pair of steel
sheers from the supply cabinet. At lunch twenty minutes later, he found a dirt
patch to sit on under a hawthorn tree, behind the cafeteria’s cement patio, and
laid the pictures out around him. He pulled out two covert feathers from the Grove
and placed them beside the pictures. He then picked up an image of a peacock
perched on a headstone outside a Yazidi shrine and began cutting around the painted
eyes at the tips of its raised train.

“Nice
strokes. Very smooth,” a breathy female voice spoke in Corbin’s left ear,
raising the hair on his arms. The shears stopped cutting.

Friday, October 27, 2017

“So
Corbin, you ever fool around with the girls?” Dr. Phillpots inquired as he
tapped Corbin on the shoulder and pointed him to the leather wingback chair
positioned against the canted bay window that looked out on the docks.

The
leather groaned as Corbin eased into the chair. An identical chair sat
opposite, with a textured glass table, featuring a bowl of
mints, interceding. Corbin glanced anxiously at the ancient cuddy cabin
boats tethered below, rocking in the twilight breeze.

“Or
maybe you like the boys?” Dr. Phillpots muttered as he searched his desk and
gathered his notes, which consisted of a legal pad and a wodge of loose scraps.
“I understand teenagers are more open these days.” When he returned and sat in
the chair opposite, Corbin shook his head. Dr. Phillpots raised his peaked
brows. His owlish pupils hung under a precipitous forehead and above a sharp
nose balancing a pair of reading glasses. Salt and pepper wisps thickened at
his temples to cover the helices of his ears.

“No? And
no business with the girls, huh?” he asked. Corbin shook his head again. “Well,
you’re young—let’s see.” He paused to look through his notes. “Fourteen. That’s
young.” He studied the young man’s face for a moment. Corbin’s bangs hung down
to his oily cheeks. His pursed lips concealed a web of gleaming braces. He had
his left hand stuck in his jeans’ pocket, fiddling with something.

“Ever
feel like hurting yourself or have suicidal thoughts, anything like that?”

Corbin
paused before replying, “No.”

“What
about hurting others? Any homicidal thoughts?”

Corbin
shook his head.

“Excellent,”
Dr. Phillpots declared. He lifted his wrist to show Corbin the face of his
pin-lever watch. “Now here’s a puzzle for you: at noon, the minute hand and the
hour hand are lined up, right? Twelve hours later, they’ll be lined up again.
How many times do they cross—so that they’re lined up like that—during those
twelve hours?”

“Um.”
Corbin envisioned the clock hands spinning in the space between his eyes and
the canted window panes. He tapped at the space to count each crossing. “Um, I
think it would be, like, twelve? Because they cross every hour?”

“Close!
Actually, it’s eleven. Each crossing adds a little bit more time to when the
hands cross, past the hour mark. Every twelve hours, all those bits add up to
an extra hour.”

Corbin
frowned.

Dr.
Phillpots scrawled a few notes on his legal pad. “So, let’s talk about what
brought you here. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

The
leather chirped as Corbin shifted in his seat again. His eyes began boring into
the vaguely botanical spirals of the Tabriz rug spread out over the office’s
mesquite floor. “I, um, wanted to see the peacocks in this place, a place where
you’re not supposed to go? But I went anyway?”

“Mm-hm.
I talked to your parents for a long time, on the phone. What I understand from
them is that there was a lot more to it?” Dr. Phillpots peered down through his
reading glasses at one of his scraps. “Let’s see: you were warned the first
time by a security officer, but you went back anyway, and got caught. The
officer called your parents to pick you up. Then you went back a third time,
and got caught a third time. That time, they were going to call the police and
have you arrested, but your parents managed to convince them not to, by
promising to put you in treatment. Did I get that right?”

Corbin
nodded.

Dr.
Phillpots tilted his head. “So, what is so damn interesting about these
peacocks?”

“T-they,
um,” Corbin started. He pinched down hard on the object in his pocket, a plastic
lenticular hologram of a peacock attached to his keychain, but it was too
late—the question had already triggered a return of the image.

Corbin’s
tear ducts ached as the image poured out from a focal point above his frontal
sinus, spreading across his sinciput to its peripheral rim and blotting out Dr.
Phillpot’s office. The image shuddered in its empyreal radiance, electrifying Corbin’s
visual cortex. This was the image: on the frozen lip of a tiered fountain
encrusted with icy fangs, an incongruous peacock perched. Even as moth-sized snowflakes
fluttered down around it, the peacock thrust out its scintillating breast and raised
its fan with all the poise of a dancer’s arabesque.

To banish
the image, Corbin gripped the bridge of his nose with his right hand while furiously
rubbing the hologram in his pocket with his left. At last the image melted
away.

“Is
something the matter?” Dr. Phillpots asked.

“No.” Corbin
worked to regain focus. “So, but, um, the peacocks, they, um … I need to be like,
near them, ‘cause of this image of a peacock I see, like, in my head? That
keeps coming back?”

“Really?”
Dr. Phillpots’ renewed interest caused him to tilt his eyes over the rim of his
glasses. “What do you mean by ‘need’?
Does this image make you do things?”

“No. It’s
not like that. It’s like—the image goes away when I’m near the peacocks? Before,
I could just, like, look at pictures of peacocks, that would make the image go
away. Like, take the image out of my head and put it in the world, outside. But
now, that’s not enough. I need to be close to the real thing now. Or something.”
Corbin cast his eyes back down into the convolutions of the Tabriz rug. “It was
the same way with the other two, before, but I found a way to get rid of those.
I don’t think there’s a way to do that with the peacock. Or, at least, I’m
afraid—I don’t know. Never mind.”

“The other
two? Oh, wait.” Dr. Phillpots thumbed through his scraps until he found the
note he was seeking and laid his index finger on it. “Your parents told me about
this also. They said there were two other incidents, before this thing with the
peacocks. Let’s see—a doll and a record player, is that it? You set the doll on
fire and smashed the record player?”

Corbin
shook his head. “No. A witch in effigy and a phonograph.”

Although
the two older images no longer possessed the occulting power of the peacock,
having both been in some way extinguished through the apotropaic magic of their tokens’ destruction, Corbin could still
recall them.

In the
first, the effigy of a witch was burning in an Italian village’s Spring Equinox
rite. The witch glowered down from her broken wicker throne atop a daïs of stacked fascines. She had been pieced
together out of a throw pillow with a crudely painted-on face, evening gloves stretched
over sticks for fingers, a gray macramé
shawl for hair, and a peasant dress propped up by a broomstick. Curtains
of flames rose around her, consuming the fascines’ branches in a bursting
bonfire, quickly reducing the witch to a charred skeletal figure.

Incited by the oppressive recurrence of this image, Corbin
had managed to build an approximation of the effigy from components found in
his parents’ closet and attic. He had then dowsed the effigy in lighter fluid
and set it aflame atop a pile of pine-needles and balled up newspapers. His
parents returned later that evening to find a smoldering black mass in their
driveway.

The second image was of a phonograph placed on the ledge
of a bell tower’s open belfry arch. Arrayed along the ledge beside it were five
lit candles. Behind it the bronze-alloy bell hung from its headstock. The brass
horn of the phonograph emitted a warbling instrumental version of the L’Internationale that echoed down through
the night. Pistol shots aimed at the phonograph hit the belfry arch. A shot
struck the turntable, which knocked the phonograph from the ledge. It tumbled
end over and end and smashed to pieces against the bricks below.

To recreate this image, Corbin used his parent’s credit
card to purchase a replica Victor Victrola phonograph from an online specialty
retailer for several hundred dollars. When it arrived, he brought it out onto
the roof and placed it on the rain gutter. He then climbed down into the yard
and began firing quarter-inch bearing balls at it with a wrist-brace slingshot.
Eventually, a ball struck the horn, causing the phonograph to tip over and smash
apart on the concrete patio below.

Dr. Phillpots had been tapping his
pen against his notepad in contemplation. “A witch and a peacock. These are pretty
potent symbols. Burning a witch in effigy is some sort of fertility rite, I
think. And a peacock clearly represents the male, uh, urge to mate. I don’t know
what the phonograph could be. Anyhow, this is what those questions at the
beginning were about. You’re entering puberty now. Possibly, these images are suppressed
sexual thoughts trying to get out. But, uh, where do you think they come from?”

“They’re from a Fellini movie,”
Corbin replied.

“What?”

“It’s called Amarcord. An Italian guy named Fellini made it.”

Dr. Phillpots squinted at Corbin in
a mild pique. “Yeah, I know who that is. I’m not sure I know this particular
film—how do you say it, ‘amour court’?”

“Am-ar-cord.”

“Okay.” Dr. Phillpots jotted the
title down. “But, what do you mean, they’re from this film? Your images are the
same ones as in the film?”

Corbin nodded.

“When did you see this film? I
assume you started seeing the images after.”

Corbin nodded. “The first image
started, like, the same night after I saw it. It was, um, right after school
started back, like, three months ago. It’s weird, I don’t know why I saw it? I
was walking home and they were playing it. I guess I just decided to see it by
myself cause, like, it only cost a couple dollars?”

Until that January afternoon, the Campanella
Sun Theatre had never caught Corbin’s attention on his way to and from Montauk High, a few blocks away. The sagging marquee
hung over warped French doors, beyond which only dark forms could be made out;
the marquee’s letterboards featured mismatched, seldom rearranged characters,
and the chase light sign had to make do with a third of its bulbs dead or
broken. That afternoon, however, Corbin had left school early and was meandering
along the sidewalk, indecisive about returning home, such that a “2$ Matinee”
flyer taped to a placard was enough to entice him in. A tall man in a canola-oil
spotted dress shirt seemed to be the Theatre’s sole employee. He grunted softly
as he handed Corbin his ticket stub.

Corbin entered
the narrow auditorium and found it empty. There hung over the raked rows of
seats the smell of rancid butter sprayed with antiseptic. Corbin’s sneakers
smacked when lifted from the lacquered floor as he walked down the center aisle
to sit. When the lights dimmed, he remained the only viewer in the house. The
audio strip of the 1974 print of Amarcord
crackled and skipped.

Curiously,
the picture seemed to contain a spheroid duplicate, seemingly laid within it at
a fainter register, as if one of the projector’s compound lens components possessed
both a spherical aberration and an optical filter for lower intensity light at certain
wavelengths. This effect made Corbin dizzy. The film itself captivated him in
its provincial pacing and parades of eccentric characters, perhaps because he
had never seen anything like it. None of the three images that would later
return to harass him stood out for him particularly during that viewing,
though.

“‘… Amarcord (the title meaning “I remember”
in the Northern dialect of Fellini’s hometown of Rimini) returns to the
director’s obsessions with the grotesqueries of the human form—specifically gargantuan
breasts, buttocks, and warts—and the boundless lust of the naïve adolescent,
this time through the genre stunts of the nostalgic memoir …’” Bending over his
desktop monitor, Dr. Phillpots scrolled down through the onscreen text, humming
to himself, before continuing: “‘… though often focused through the eyes of a
teenage boy in the bloom of his sexual awakening, a boy who chafes against the
ludicrous self-importance of his teachers and parents, as a kind of cinematic Entwicklungsroman, the film just as often
strays off onto tangents about the fantasies of street peddlers, the ancient
history of the town’s founding, the pompous processions and nighttime crimes of
the Black Shirts, the perplexities and paradoxes of family and death …’”

“What is that?” Corbin asked.

“Huh?”

“What you’re reading.”

“Oh, a thing about the film, I don’t know what it
is,” Dr. Phillpots replied. He clicked off the monitor and returned to his
chair. “What it sounds like, with the ‘sexual flowering of a juvenile boy’ or
whatever—it sounds like what I was talking about, though, don’t you think?”

Corbin frowned.

“Well, you can think about it.” Dr. Phillpots
looked at his watch. “We need to finish up pretty soon. I want to show you a
few things that I think will help before that. These techniques should stop you
from seeing the same image over and over—what we call an ‘intrusive thought.’ At
least, they should work well enough in the meantime, before our next session.”

The systematic desensitization,
aversion therapy, and convert conditioning techniques that Dr. Phillpots then showed
Corbin would turn out not to work well enough in the meantime, however. 9.30.2017 (c)

Saturday, September 30, 2017

“So
Corbin, tell me, do you ever fool around with the girls?” Dr. Phillpots asked
as he tapped Corbin on the shoulder and pointed him to the leather wingback chair
positioned against the canted bay window that looked out on the docks.

The
leather groaned as Corbin eased into the chair. An identical chair sat opposite,
with a textured glass table, featuring a bowl of mints, interceding. Corbin
glanced anxiously at the ancient cuddy cabin boats tethered below, rocking in
the twilight breeze.

“Or
maybe you like boys?” Dr. Phillpots muttered as he searched his desk and gathered
his notes, which consisted of a legal pad and a wodge of loose scraps. “I
understand teenagers are more open these days.” When he returned and sat in
the chair opposite, Corbin shook his head. Dr. Phillpots raised his peaked brows
quizzically. His owlish pupils hung under a precipitous forehead and above a
sharp nose balancing a pair of reading glasses. Salt and pepper wisps thickened
at his temples to cover the helices of his ears.

“No? And
no business with the girls, huh?” he asked. Corbin shook his head again. “Well,
you’re young—let’s see.” He paused to look through his notes. “Fourteen. That’s
young.” He studied the young man’s face for a moment. Corbin’s bangs hung down to his oily cheeks. His pursed
lips concealed a web of gleaming braces. He had his left hand stuck in his
jeans’ pocket, fiddling with something.

“Ever
feel like hurting yourself or have suicidal thoughts, anything like that?”

Corbin paused
before replying, “No.”

“What
about hurting others? Any homicidal thoughts?”

Corbin
shook his head.

“Excellent,”
Dr. Phillpots declared. He lifted his wrist to show Corbin the face of his pin-lever
watch. “Now here’s a puzzle for you: at noon, the minute hand and the hour hand
are lined up, right? Twelve hours later, they’ll be lined up again. How many times
do they cross—so that they’re lined up like that—during those twelve hours?”

“Um.”
Corbin envisioned the clock hands whirling in the space between his eyes and
the canted window panes. He tapped at the space to count each crossing. “Um, I think
it would be—like, twelve? Because they cross every hour?”

“Close!
Actually, it’s eleven. Each crossing adds a little bit more time to when the
hands cross, past the hour mark. Every twelve hours, all those bits add up to
an extra hour.”

Corbin frowned.

Dr.
Phillpots scrawled a few notes on his legal pad and sighed. “So let’s talk
about what brought you here. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

Corbin
shifted in his seat, and the leather groaned and chirped. His eyes began boring
into the vaguely botanical spirals of the Tabriz rug spread out over the
office’s mesquite-wood floor. “I, um, wanted to see the peacocks in this place, a
place where you’re not supposed to go? But I went anyway?”

“Mm. I
talked to your parents for a long time, on the phone. What I understand from
them is there was a lot more to it?” Dr. Phillpots peered down through his
reading glasses at one of his scraps. “Let’s see: you were warned the first
time by a security officer, but you went back anyway, and got caught. The
officer called your parents to pick you up. Then you went back a third time,
and got caught a third time. That time they were going to call the police and
have you arrested, but your parents managed to convince them not to, by
promising to put you in treatment. Did I get that right?”

Corbin nodded.

Dr.
Phillpots tilted his head. “So what is it about these peacocks that’s so
interesting?”

Friday, September 15, 2017

Corbin
Knopf, age fourteen, had tried his best not to think of the peacocks—the
swaying stalks of their coruscating blue necks, the spray of their brush-tipped
crowns, the convex pivot of their meters-wide, fanned trains, with elongated
coverts flashing arrays of their painted eyes.

His
parents had brought him to a psychiatrist after he had been caught trespassing a third
time into the gated neighborhood of Peacock Grove. He had been stalking after
the peafowl there that strut between the citrus trees in the Grove’s central roundabout and drag their trains along the lawns, shedding their precious covert
stems. It began one afternoon when Corbin had slithered on his belly through a
gap between the iron gate’s lower lip and the gully running along the shady
gravel road to the Grove. He was seeking the source of the spectral ululations he
had heard from a nearby artery and identified at once as the cry of his
favorite bird.

Security
Officer Mandy Nutate, sitting in the logo-stamped microcar parked catawampus to the Gatehouse,
had watched with languid amusement upon first spotting Corbin. He was crawling
on hands and knees to position himself among the peafowl. It seemed he wished
to inch as close as possible to them without drawing their attention. This was
as much to be among them in their unconscious meanderings as to avoid spooking
them.

With his
palm-sized camera, Corbin began snapping apparently hundreds of shots of the dozen
or so peafowl. He crouched to frame the birds among the encompassing crescent
of waxy trunks. The peacocks turned elliptically to the dull gray peahens in
the center of their group and shivered out their trains’ fans at them. The
larger peacocks would now and then jerk their iridescent displays and dip their
beaks threateningly toward the other males who edged too close to their intended
mates. Corbin held his finger depressed on the autofocusing camera’s shutter release,
filling its memory card; his eyes were as wide and glassy as the camera’s lens.

Officer
Mandy was content to watch Corbin without interfering while she sat draining her bodega-purchased
Suplex-Soda. Her wage was too pathetic to inspire in her any special jealousy
over her ambit. Besides, the looping cobblestone lanes and yawning front yards had
lain vacant in the sloping sun all afternoon. The only entities in Officer
Mandy’s sight were a dragonfly twitching on the microcar’s windshield, the
peafowl, and Corbin.

Then she
noticed Corbin collecting the stray coverts left in the wake of the peacocks’ spurts;
he carefully coiled them to stow in his red tote bag. She feared questions from
the residents. Specifically, the twin girls from the hacienda-style manse just
above the roundabout who often harvested these feathers upon returning from aerial
contortion practice would ask if the gardener had composted them. She imagined the
twins’ mother, if she were to learn what happened, peppering the neighbors with
portents of an insidious feather snatcher economy plaguing the Grove. Officer
Mandy snorted and resigned herself to cautioningthe boy.

She jammed
her Suplex-Soda in the cup-holder and heaved out of the microcar. When she scanned
the roundabout again, though, Corbin was gone. She threw herself back into the
driver’s seat and flipped the ignition switch. The electric engine sang in a high-pitched
glissando as she swung the microcar onto the cobbled lane in pursuit. After
triggering the front gate remotely, she found Corbin half-way down the gravel
road. She pulled into the shoulder ahead of him and got out. He stopped short
and looked down at his sneaker, drawing an S in the dust with its toe.